Question

I have a remote database (at the moment sqlite, but eventually mysql) that I want to be able to call from a webpage dynamically. Basically to query for data that will populate goog viz charts etc on the page (and possibly images).

I have a small, slow server that i can basically run anything on. I’ve also located the python lib that lets me painlessly generate the data in a format that is friendly for goog viz (http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/dev/gviz_api_lib.html)

but, what i cant understand is how do i go from there to the point where i have a url, to which i can pass arguments and get the data back? googling suggests django (or pylons), but isnt that a bit OTT (i dont have experiance with either). I’m opening to learning how to use them, but atm im very confused as to what exactly i need to be able to run this webservice.

help greatly appreciated.

thanks!

Answer 1

The first thing you’ll need to do is deploy a web server (apache is a common choice).
Once your server is running, you can test it by pushing simple HTML files to it and make sure they are accessible to you from a browser.

Once your server is properly configured, you have a number of options available for interfacing your web-server with Python:

• The easiest is probably to follow the deployment guide of a popular web framework, as you mentioned.
  • Pylons Deployment Guide
  • Django Installation Guide
• You can use mod_python directly, which requires adding boilerplate code around your code to work inside a mod_python instance.
  • mod_python documentation
• You can use CGI, which does not scale very well but makes it fairly easy to interact with the web-server:
  • Python’s built-in CGI module